WeChat Friends from Friend-a-Like to Friend-a-Pat by Tickle Function

Do you have a take-a-pat?

This is a recent buzzword in China. What is take-a-pat?

In WeChat V 7.0.13，you can click 「tickle」on the personal 「Profile」of 「Me」, where you can set the nickname that will be displayed when friends tickle you. Then, your friends can double-click your profile photo in a chat, you can see a message saying that you are patted by your friends.

For example, if it is set to “shoulders, head or cat” when a friend “tap” on you in a group chat, they will be presented as “XXX tapped my shoulder”, which will be visible to the group friends. I patted you, it might represent read, comfort, thanks, or even jokes.

What’s been interesting on the user’s side from my perspective, is that the “take-a-pat” has some positive energy, while also produces some evil humours.

For example, under the influence of the epidemic, some University held an unforgettable graduation ceremony using the take-a-pat function to grant degrees to every graduate student in WeChat groups. The employee patted the boss in the group chat and was immediately moved out of the group by the boss. Your Mummy patted your “chubby little hands” in the family group.

The social media and group chats have been flooded with the take-a-pat function which is only developed by one line of code. The imaginative and creative WeChat users have created various funny phrases.

A lot of different perspectives on this function.

Guide Users to Update

Some people say that the purpose of the “tickle” function is to allow WeChat users to upgrade to the new version, so as to pave the way for the promotion of new function “video channels” which is regarded as the ace played by WeChat. They say that the release of “video channels” was caused by Tencent’s defeat in the short video field facing aggressive competitors such as Douyin (TikTok in China).
However, there is one saying that the introduction of such a function, although narrowing the social distance, also reduces the value of information.
All useful information in the group chat is overwhelmed by the meaningless and harassing trickle information.

Less Strong Reminder

In the past, WeChat Message is an instant strong reminder. Take-a-pat as a light reminder will help users ease the anxiety of receiving information, giving users a sense of self-identity, and making the atmosphere pleasant.

Less Social Stress

Take-a-pat moves the actions of expressing friendliness in real life to online chat to increase mutual acceptance and interaction.

Different people have different opinions on the same product function.

From my point of view, no matter what effect the product function actually achieves, for WeChat, the first consideration must be how this product function allows users to communicate better.
I will come from the following three perspectives to evaluate the new functions of WeChat:
1. Whether it is good for user communication.
2. Whether it is good for user expression.
3. Whether it is good for people to understand each other.
The essence of WeChat is a communication tool.

In the social scenario, we have friends relationships like Damon and Pythias or just Like others on Facebook. I would like to call those the friends-a-pat who use the take-a-pat function.

In my opinion, “take-a-pat” is conducive to user communication and expression. After the @ function was abused, the information in WeChat made me feel anxious, because once working and having a wide range of interests in WeChat, the relationship is always in different groups. I was reminded by @ in work-groups and in interest-groups, so I quit lots of groups and even learned and pretended to be invisible and silent and not to send msg in groups.

After “take-a-pat” was released, I find that some once-silent groups start to be reactivated. In some scenes, “take-a-pat” replaced the original @ function. There is no strong reminder anymore. When you enter the group, you will only see someone “patting” yourself, which reduces the communication pressure a lot.

Patting each other on WeChat makes each other feel intimate, and subtlely forges a closer relationship with each other. Allen Zhang said in his Moment of WeChat that only one line of code is needed to implement this function. Although the change is small, it is a very effective way to improve the communication of WeChat users.